Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Following is the letter I wrote to Mr Stephen Conroy today. He is a Federal Senator. Senator Conroy was appointed Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy on 3 December 2007.

He is proposing a “clean feed”. The current webpage for this policy at the ALP is “offline”. Here is the plan for cyber safety that has on page 2 the intention to provide a mandatory clean feed.

And here is the EFA Australia’s analysis of the plan and why it wont work.

In light of the furore that has erupted around the nets with this proposal I have written a letter to Mr Conroy.

I have written before at length about the stupidity of the government in attempting to filter the internet against pornography, or illegal content or in fact anything at all.

The subject of internet filtering and censorship has raised its ugly head here in Australia again. The internet and media has been buzzing in the last few days with the Rudd government’s minister for Telecommunications Stephen Conroy announcing mandatory internet filters.

This article from ZDNet with interviews from the leaders of three of Australia's largest internet service providers - Telstra Media's Justin Milne, iiNet's Michael Malone and Internode's Simon Hackett - summarises the technical legal and ethical arguments the best I have read so far.

Microsoft released an extraordinary security patch yesterday.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644)

Published: October 23, 2008

Seeing as Microsoft only release patches once a month, this is totally unexpected, and indicates the critical nature of the flaw. One surmises that there are already hackers and other criminals already exploiting this flaw.

There are lots of details in the MS08-067 bulletin and there is starting to be a fair bit of chatter on the tubes about it – see this from Nick MacKechnie for example where he points to the Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog.

We emailed all our clients and suggested they patch immediately, or invite us to remotely connect to them and manage that for them.

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)